The Biggest Mountains

We arrived back in Namche yesterday afternoon. A lot has happened since I was able to post last, I'll try to back up and at least get all the highlights in.

We left Namche a couple weeks ago and headed up valley toward Tengboche and Island Peak. We stayed the first night in Pangboche and then moved on to Dingboche the next day. The mountain views just got better each day, as we left Namche we had great views of Everest, Lhotse and Ama Dablam. Eventually we passed right below Ama Dablam and up the valley on the north side of the mountain. Island Peak is bordered on the north side by the Lhotse Face, one of the tallest mountain faces in the world and to the south is Ama Dablam. We reached Base Camp in just a few days and took one rest day before attempting the peak. Our acclimatization was good and we didn't have any problems with altitude sickness on the route. It was strange camping on dirt at 17,000 ft. Things are definitely a little different here. The climb was pretty straight forward with minimal technical difficulties. We left camp around 3AM and got to the top about 10AM. I was feeling pretty sick, but it wasn't the altitude. I came down with a pretty bad chest cold that knocked me out for a couple of days. The altitude and cold dry air just seemed to make it even worse. At least I was still able to climb Island Peak. The view from the top was incredible, huge mountains as far as I could see in every direction. I'll post some pictures when I get back to the states.

After Island Peak we descended to Dingboche where I spent a couple of days recovering from my cold. We left Island Peak just in time as large guided groups arrived and quickly over ran the small base camp. I've got a great picture of a dozen yellow tents surrounding my small green tent. They set up so closely that the porter pounding in stakes for one of the tents poked a hole in my tent. I was less than pleased but laughed it off since there wasn't much I could do and we were leaving later that day anyways. After a couple days in Dingboche I was feeling better so we moved up to Lobuche East Basecamp. This camp was much more to our liking since we were the only ones there. We had dragged a bunch of ice climbing gear up the mountain with us but we talked to a couple of guys coming down from the top who told us the summit ridge was extremely loose, unconsolidated snow. So we left the useless ice gear we had lugged halfway around the world in camp. The climbing was more technical than on Island Peak, but not too hard. It started with some fun rock scrambling up through a series of rock bands then onto steeper snow and finally a steep and exposed snow arete. The arete topped out on the summit ridge. The true summit is along the ridge a little ways, across a deep notch and a corniced subsidiary summit. We passed on both of these because of the poor snow conditions and sat on the first summit for over an hour taking in the views. Across the valley loomed Everest, Nuptse, and the Lhotse Face. Up valley was Pumori and further away Cho Oyu. Such incredible mountains, the weather was crystal clear and dead calm so we just sat up there for awhile and tried to soak it all in. Finally we started the descent. Just above the rock bands I saw a couple of other folks down below us, as I got closer I realized it was our porters. Our porters were supposed to be in Dughla, a small village at the foot of the peak. They weren't supposed to come up to our camp until the following day, and they certainly weren't supposed to be at 18,500 ft on the mountain. Apparently they had gotten bored in Dughla and decided to come pay us a visit, finding our camp empty they had headed up the mountain to see how high they could go. No ropes, crampons, ice axes, plastic boots or any other climbing gear, they had my two ski poles between the three of them, thats it. Brian and I gave them our ice axes to help with the descent and by some miracle we made it back to the dirt without any of them taking a major spill. I still get a good laugh thinking about how ridiculous it was, I got some great pictures of that.

We descended to Dughla that night and then got to Namche yesterday. This morning we said goodbye to our porters and sent them on their way. Brian and I are planning to leave on a 10 or 12 day trek tomorrow morning up the Thame valley across Renjo Pass, down to Gokyo and then across Cho La and back into the Khumbu Valley before returning to Namche. It will be nice to hike without all of our climbing gear and without trying to explain to our porters that we don't really have a plan, we're just taking it one day at a time.

I hope everyone is doing well. I'm having an incredible time in Nepal. Hard to believe that my trip is more than half over. Its so great to wake up each morning and know that all I have to do is go hiking or climbing all day. The good life.

Namche

We arrived in Namche the day before yesterday. Namche is pretty nice but very touristy. Yesterday Brian and I took a long hike up onto a ridge above the village. We started the hike by following the main path up to the Everest View but we quickly tired of the crowds and headed off in a different direction. One of our porters went with us but when Brian and I started hiking off the trail to head straight for the ridge we wanted to be up on he absolutely refused to follow us. We thought it was pretty funny. We climbed up onto the ridge which was at about 4200 meters and got great views of Everest, Lhotse, and Ama Dablam. We are both doing ver well with the altitude and the extra day that we've taken here should help us even more as we go higher. We are both ready to be moving further up the trail.

The hike to Namche was very nice but the trail is incredibly touristy. We've started joking that we're on the GC (Geriatric Circuit) because nearly all of the tourists are older men. Brian and I are hoping to do a trek to a much more remote area with far less tourists when we are finished climbing. I'm really looking forward to that. From Namche we are headed up to Island Peak and then to Lobuche Peak. We dropped Pokalde from our plans because it would have been very expensive to get that permit. We are hoping to scramble a few smaller peaks in the Gokyo Valley or towards Thame. We should be back in Namche in less than three weeks and I will try to post again then. I hope everyone is doing well and I'm looking forward to seeing you all when I get back.

Flying away

This post needs to be brief since we still have a lot to do and our flight is at 730 tomorrow morning. We fly to Lukla and if we are able to arrange everything we will start the trek into the mountains tomorrow. The first peak we are headed to is Island Peak. I should be able to make one more post from Namche before going into the hills. We are both really psyched about the trip and anxious to get out of Kathmandu. Hope everyone is doing well.

Consistently Inconsistent

I met up with Brian on Friday and we've spent the last few days trying to get permits for the peaks arranged and flights booked to Lukla and tying up whatever other loose ends we've got. Brian met a shopkeeper, named Sanjew, of a jewelry shop on one of the main streets here in Thamel (the tourist area in Kathmandu) amazingly he didn't try to sell Brian anything but rather invited us to a party. Neither of us really had any idea what to expect so we met him at his shop and just went with it. His brother picked us up and drove us up to a nice house in a different part of the city. We sat in the garden and talked politics (not surprisingly they hate Bush), religion (arranged marriages are still the norm in many places here), and a lot about American culture (they are surprisingly convinced that Hollywood is the real America). We also met another brother and a cousin, Sidarth. Sidarth is in charge of the business and even though he is younger than the brothers they treat him with immense respect. It was strange because we never sat down and talked to all of them at once, but instead they each cycled through to talk to us and then disappeared to a different part of the house. Strange party. For dinner they served mutton in curry with rice and a kind of bread. It was really good although the meat was still on the bone. We found out later that the bone the meat was attached to was the skull. Delicious sheep head with brain and all, probably better I didn't know that until after the meal. We had lunch with Sanjew the next day and went back to their house on Saturday for dinner. Its been an interesting cultural experience.

So in addition to eating bizarre meals with strangers we've been trying to get our permits arranged for the peaks we want to climb. The only thing that I'm certain of is that if you ask 10 different people the same question you are guranteed to get 10 different answers. Progress has been slow, we have to go through a trekking agency to get the permits. We probably went into 8 or 10 different places trying to get straight answers on our plans. It was incredible how wide the range of answers to our questions were. Finally we settled on an agency today and paid our fees, arranged porters, and arranged our flights to Lukla. Hopefully we will fly the day after tomorrow, but we are not sure yet. I'll try to post once or twice more before we head into the hills. We are having a great time and really looking forward to getting into the mountains.

Holy Cows and Car Exhaust

Well I finally made it to Kathmandu. Pretty good flight over from Bangkok, I got lucky and was able to get my baggage fees waved because I was flying from the United States. If you are flying from somewhere else Thai Airways charges you $4.50 for each pound over 44 that you have in baggage. I had 100 lbs of baggage, so that was a lot of money saved. Apparently Americans travel with more baggage than everybody else, who knew? The taxi I took from the airport was just like my old red subaru, except the taxie had more rust and less suspension. On the ride to the guesthouse I started feeling light headed and nauseaous from all the fumes. I thought it was just being in Kathmandu where the air quality is terrible, nope just he fumes from the taxi leaking inside. I got to see a little of the city on the way over; several holy cows which look like they're fed better than some of the people, a guy carrying a full wooden bedset on his back ( one guy, huge bedset), and more twisting and turning alleys than I'll ever be able to fathom. The guesthouse is not bad, 12 dollars for a king size bed and a private bathroom. I'll probably move to a cheaper one tomorrow to save money. Well I need to see if I can meet up with Brian so I'll wrap this up.

Off to Nepal!!!

On Wednesday October 15th I’m outta here. I fly from Anchorage to Bangkok where I’ll spend one night and then on to Kathmandu the next day. If everything goes according to plan I should be meeting Brian Von Tersch in Kathmandu on Friday the 17th, my birthday. We are planning to try to climb three peaks in the Everest Region of the Himalayas. Island Peak, Pokalde, and Lobuche East are the three peaks we are going to try. This is my first trip to Nepal and the Himalayas. I’m psyched for the trip but I don’t think it has really set in that in less than a week I’ll be on the other side of the world.
I’ll try to email or post on this blog when I can, but I think it will probably be hard to do once we get up in the mountains. I’ll be back in Alaska in about six weeks.








Pokalde



















Island Peak














Lobuche East

Mount Brooks

I just got back from doing a climb of Mt Brooks. Chris, one of the mountaineering rangers, and Josh, a mountain guide, went with me on this trip. This is Mt Brooks from the Thorofare River, two days of hiking away from the base of the climb. Our route, the north ridge, followed the prominent ridgeline running down to the right of the summit.

Chris and Josh looking out over the moraine of the Muldrow Glacier from west of Anderson Pass. Lots of rain and snow on the hike in. It snowed on us almost everyday, but the weather was never bad enough to really stop us from moving.

Steep climbing on very rotten rock. Our base camp was down below the snowline in this picture. The terrain improved dramatically just a few hundred feet above this photo when we were able to move on the ridge proper.

The climbing along the ridge was nice. You can see our tracks down lower on the ridge on the left side of this photo. Down below is the Brooks Glacier.

We dug our camp right into the ridgeline. We had a beautiful spot here. It took us awhile to dig out this spot but the view was incredible when the clouds finally parted.

This section of the ridge was just above our camp. This was one of the steeper and more exposed sections of the route.

The ridge was corniced in several areas. The snow was pretty good for the most part with only one major section of post-holing that Josh broke through like a champ.

Me on the summit. I lead the last section to the top. It was tough to tell exactly where the top was as we came up the ridge and we passed over one major false summit. I was a little surprised when I poked my head above a drift on the ridge to discover the summit. The top was pretty broad and flat with great views of some of the other peaks in the range including the east face of Denali, behind me, and Mt Mather (not shown).

The descent back to the glacier was pretty straight-forward even though the visibility was poor. The few sketchy spots we had been concerned about on the way up were not bad at all on the way down.

Back down on the Muldrow Glacier we found huge rivers flowing on top of the ice. These rivers carve deep canyons that are very difficult to cross. We had to cross three or four major rivers in order to get to Oastler Pass.

Even after we got back to relatively low elevations it continued to snow. This is at about 5500 ft. We were surprised by this sunset after several hours of heavy snowfall.

Two days of hiking, twenty miles, and a crossing of the McKinley River brought us out to Wonder Lake. Mt Brooks is the pointy peak on the left and Denali is on the right. I had a great time on this trip and came back with even more climbing projects to pursue off the Muldrow.